Tinnitus is a psychoacoustic phenomenon experienced by many people, at least as a transient event. Tinnitus is signified by a perception of sounds usually having no source outside of the tinnitus patient's auditory nervous system. For some forms of tinnitus, the source of the sounds (somatosounds) is somewhere in the body, usually in the head and/or the neck region. In any event, although some tinnitus patients are able to adapt to the condition without the need for clinical intervention, others may experience severe distress including cognitive, emotional, and sleep disorders, any of which may impact everyday activities.
Although treatment options may be available to tinnitus patients, effective treatment of the condition depends at least in part on accurate clinical assessment. For example, it may be necessary to understand and quantify the particular sound(s) of the patient's tinnitus manifestation (e.g., spectral location and/or loudness). In addition, it may be desirable to monitor changes, if any, in a patient's tinnitus to measure efficacy of a prescribed course of treatment.
Currently, various tests may be used to assess tinnitus. For example, pitch and loudness matching may be performed and generally involve matching between a patient's tinnitus and a pure tone. However, in some cases, a patient's tinnitus may manifest itself more as a range of tones than as a single tone. Various other techniques may include masking levels to determine the level (loudness) of sound that just barely masks (covers) the sound of a patient's tinnitus. Still further, testing for residual inhibition may be performed to determine whether any reduction in loudness of a patient's tinnitus occurs as a result of acoustic stimulation.
Despite the various tests that may be used for assessing a patient's tinnitus, standard test protocols for clinical assessment of tinnitus are virtually non-existent. Thus, repeating any given testing protocol for the same and/or different patients may be impossible, particularly if more than one clinician administers diagnostic assessments. Furthermore, determining a meaningful comparison between the severities of patients' tinnitus may be impossible due to this introduction of variables to the testing protocol.